What's my online?

Well, toss me a cassette tape and call me a Luddite. Seems I left out the Internet when I wrote my April 7 cover story about the ways fledgling artists break into the business these days.

True, they do walk the walk, pounding on gallery doors carrying slick portfolios and polka-dot business cards and glittery PR grins. “Please, sir, just one solo exhibit?”

But reader Lile Elam gently reminded me (via a technology called "electronic mail") that there’s also this newfangled invention called the World Wide Web that many artists use to get their work into the fabled “out there.”

Elam may be a mite biased, as she runs a website called Art on the Net (Art.Net) where artists curate their own on-line galleries. Still, her point is well taken. Art.Net has been live from her Palo Alto home office since 1994 and includes painters, poets, sculptors, video artists, etc. Links include the Peninsula Sculptors' Guild, New Zealand Artists and the Room of Israeli Artists.

Elam says the artists get valuable exposure and learn from each other how to market themselves. Although the site isn't commercial, art collectors contact the artists directly to make purchases, without a gallery middleman. "The artists themselves are in control of their own works and spaces," she says.

That's happening all over the web today, of course. Do a search for "online galleries" and you'll be up for days. Brand-new artists are muscling in side-by-side with established longtimers.

So maybe the modern challenge isn't getting your work out there; it's getting someone, somehow to notice you in the growing crowd.

Pictured: "Snail," an oil painting by Lile Elam